Tabletop Roleplaying Games and Board Games

[The Batlord]

Originally Posted by Howard the Duck

^^the trick is to immediately buy once you land on expensive property and have enough cash

[Howard the Duck]

i dunno

just being my usual inane self

[Unknown Soldier]

Originally Posted by Howard the Duck

anybody still playing Monopoly these days?

had tons of fun with it when I was young

I love Monopoly but haven't played in a couple of years, it was always a heart stopping moment when you had to go past somebody else's expensive properties, especially when they have those nasty red hotels on them. An unlucky dice roll would could seen you cleaned out.

[cledussnow]

Originally Posted by tore

A mod should change the name of the thread to Tabletop Roleplaying Games

I used to play a lot with my friends back where I come from. We started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was in elementary and we kept playing various games like D&D (of course) and just about all of White Wolf's World of Darkness games and occasional others like Shadowrun, Castle Falkenstein or Western.

After I moved to study in 2005, I haven't really found new gamer friends, but I get the rare game squeezed in here and there when I go back "home" on vacations. My friends don't play as much as we used to (used to be a weekly thing) so overall, we do it much less. There hasn't been a campaign lasting for more than a few months in a long time, I think, whereas before they'd last for years.

One of the funniest campaigns we had running back in the day was a WoD Changeling campaign. The Changeling game is not that great (imo), but our GM took the parts he liked and made something subtly different which was more our style. We ended up playing a gang of boys in a small Scottish town where all these supernatural events took place, but most adults were oblivious to all of it. I was a bit like Alice in Wonderland meets Eerie Indiana / Goosebumps. Great fun!

Inspired by that, I'm actually planning a similar game these days when I go back home in easter. It'll be a bit like our Changeling campaign, only the characters will be fully human and we thought we'd put the action in an alternative version of the town we're from. That way, we all know the setting and we can share GM duties. I'm hoping doing it like that, I can GM some, play some and hopefully, the campaign will keep going while I'm not there and when I get back, it'll still be familiar enough for me to step right into the action.

I used to play tons.

Shadowrun was a pretty great game.

Originally Posted by Howard the Duck

i used to play a fair bit in the old days - you really do need a good GM for this kinda stuff, and my club never really had one, it usually devolved into pure hackenslash, although the GM did try hard to evoke atmosphere and setting

i played the Cthulhu modules, but it was never actually "scary", cos the depictions of the Old Gods aren't really clear and as soon as you see them, you go insane, it's a fail-safe device built into the module like a "deus ex machina" or something, so we couldn't like confront an Elder God, most of the time it was like a stealth game, and we hacked minor demons

Call of Cthulhu was fun I only played a few times. My first time, I was the noob of the group and made the mistake of reading 4 books while in Paris. My character was found in a fetal position under the bed of the hotel room and never recovered...

Others we used to play:
Champions
Boothill or something it was a wild west rpg
Paranoia - My alltime fav. Crazy game where everyone was robots and you had 5 clones. It was illegal to be a member of any lodge, but every character WAS, so you had to always watch your back and it was a lot of passing notes between players and the dm. Cool game with a very appropriate name.

Originally Posted by tore

If we can include card games, then Magic: The Gathering is actually my favourite. Some of the Munchkin games are also quite fun - and typically a messy affair with vague rules and lots of backstabbing, etc.

Axis and Allies I've only played once (even though I own it) and I thought that there were two many things (units) to keep track of on the board.

I enjoy Axis & Allies. There is a pc version which is good because you don't have to set all of it up and keep track as much. It's bad because I like to roll real dice.

Originally Posted by Howard the Duck

anybody still playing Monopoly these days?

had tons of fun with it when I was young

Monopoly was a favorite as a kid. My boy will be 9 soon and I am thinking of introducing him to it.


My current fav board game is Ticket to Ride. A train track laying game where you must try to connect cities by rail. pretty unique.

Another unique and fun card game is Mille Bournes. A game where you "race" the other team(s) by laying mile cards down, your opponents can lay accidents and flat tires on you as well. Pretty neat and different

[The Batlord]

Originally Posted by cledussnow

I enjoy Axis & Allies. There is a pc version which is good because you don't have to set all of it up and keep track as much. It's bad because I like to roll real dice.

I seem to remember a friend telling me the PC version sucked back in the day. It would be great to not have to set the board up though. If you just do it and don't waste time, you could probably do it in like ten, fifteen minutes, but I'm easily distracted and am always watching TV when I play (by myself), so it always takes like an hour.

[LoathsomePete]

I played Settlers of Catan on Saturday with my gaming friends and it was... an interesting experience. For the uninitiated it's basically a resource gathering competition game where you need to collect resources to build roads and settlements and the first one to 10 victory points wins. Things like little settlements are worth 1 victory point while cities are worth two, plus there are development cards which you can trade in certain combinations of resources to get which are often also worth victory points. It's an interesting game because players are never eliminated from the game and you never war against the other so there's a bit more strategy involved.

One thing that we didn't do was use the generic layout of all the resources which resulted in myself and one of the other players having monopolies on specific resources, and another player with almost no resources. It did make it tough some rounds where you keep rolling numbers that don't correspond to resources you control but the rounds go by quickly and the game doesn't take too long to set up so it's not much of an issue. I wouldn't say it's for everyone but if you're looking for a different game that still implements many of the same trappings of most board games, I would definitely recommend Catan.

[mr dave]

Originally Posted by LoathsomePete

It did make it tough some rounds where you keep rolling numbers that don't correspond to resources you control but the rounds go by quickly and the game doesn't take too long to set up so it's not much of an issue.

Catan is a great game and situations like this are great opportunities if you've got a group that can recognize when to step up and around normal rules. Just start making side deals around the table, like... if you give me 2 ore and a wood I'll stop building roads into your territory and give you a beer.

Speaking of board games, anyone familiar with Scotland Yard (originally form mid-late 80s)? It's a twist on typical board games where it's 1 player trying to elude the rest of the group until the game runs out of turns.

Originally Posted by Plankton

...and Chess is always good.

NO. Chess is the greatest.


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As for the whole Axis&Allies deal. I recall playing that one a few times in college, it was more fun than Risk, but the game -can- be broken. One guy took it home to 'study' and the next time we played it was mathematically impossible to beat him. It's been over a decade so I don't remember specifically how he did it, only that it's possible to break that one in a bad way.

[cledussnow]

Originally Posted by mr dave

As for the whole Axis&Allies deal. I recall playing that one a few times in college, it was more fun than Risk, but the game -can- be broken. One guy took it home to 'study' and the next time we played it was mathematically impossible to beat him. It's been over a decade so I don't remember specifically how he did it, only that it's possible to break that one in a bad way.

Well I know, from playing it repeatedly, that a single player playing all 3 allies cannot be beaten. They are too strong when governed by a single mind.

When there are 5 people playing is when it is the best and when the Axis have a slight advantage imo.

[mr dave]

Originally Posted by cledussnow

Well I know, from playing it repeatedly, that a single player playing all 3 allies cannot be beaten. They are too strong when governed by a single mind.

When there are 5 people playing is when it is the best and when the Axis have a slight advantage imo.

I think that's exactly what happened, 1 guy playing all the Allies and 3 of us playing various bits of the Axis. Either way it's indicative of a flawed design that should be amended in future iterations of the game. Even something as simple as forcing an extra transition turn when crossing the oceans would likely balance things out.

[The Batlord]

Well, since the war itself wasn't balanced, it would make it would ruin the game to make it balanced.